As we continue our project of decluttering, I continue to find interesting things. Interesting to me, anyway. Easily amused, remember? It turns out that we had two Zip drives. An earlier one that required a power cord and this one which was driven by the USB port. In the evolution of storage devices, I think I have had one of each. I probably have at least a two dozen of them (some of which have recently gone bye-bye.) I have also had several tape drives. A lot of that was driven by trying to find a suitable back up method. As far as I am concerned, the tools in Windows, well, suck.

I remember when I got a 10 MB internal hard drive. I was flying high! It is sobering that it couldn't hold more than two photos that I take today. I also got an Iomega 10 MB removable media drive. It was a tandem, two of them in one giant housing. It used an eight inch or so disk that was housed in a hard covering. I thought the real step forward was the original 100 Meg Zip Drive. I used it all the time. The kids used it. Ginny used it. Then they made a 250 meg version (which is pictured herre today). Then there was the Jaz drive, 2 gig if I remember right. It just kept getting better. I now have several external 4 TB hard drives as well as a pile, literally, of smaller drives that sit on the shelf. I just looked up at the shelf and there was a stack of five, readily visible, that range from 320 MB to 2 GB. I have already trashed about a dozen smaller external drives. They were slow and didn't hold an effective amount of data. I ended up smashing them with a hammer because I didn't want to donate them and have some goon harvest personal data off them.

I am not much of a prognosticator. I went with Beta Max and Zune. Good choices, huh? But I am waiting in the weeds for the next step up. The solid state drives are on the way. You can get a 2TB SSD external drive for about $1500. Still too pricey for me. When they get a 4TB SSD for under $1000, I am going to order two. It won't be long now. In the mean time I will just make do with what I got.

Use it up.
Wear it out.
Make it do.
Or do without.